Chicken Patties

Chicken pattie day, which happens about once every two weeks, brings an unwavering sense of excitement for my kids. To preface the situation, my kids will not come near any food they cannot identify. On quesadilla day, three-fourths of my kids go hungry in light of the fear of eating something which is unknown and therefore potentially “gross.” They’ll pick up the quesadilla, pull apart the layers, eye it carefully, sniff it, and then with a shout out of “EW!” throw it down and sit with a grumpy, pouty look on their face until the end of lunch when they throw the tray away, and then proceed to complain for the rest of the day about how hungry they are. I would say this routine is the same for 3 out of 5 days each week…quesadilla day, chicken parmesan day, “maxy stick” day, chicken gravy day, fajita day…all of these wildly foreign foods are bound to lead to temper-tantrums in the second grade.

So on chicken pattie day, the kids are ecstatic to eat something familiar, and I’m equally ecstatic that I won’t have to bargain with hungry kids all afternoon. You surely have seen the infamous chicken pattie before: it is uniformly round, about 1/2 inch thick, lightly breaded, and fried up in grease. You could it eat it plain, on a dinner roll, between two slices of famously soft Bunny bread, or, if you really want to push the limits of the chicken pattie,  you can eat it on whole-wheat, flaxseed, sprouted pita bread with 70 calories and 10 grams of fiber (my kids would obviously love this option).

Or if you are in the Pope School cafeteria, you could eat it with 6 packs of mayonnaise and no bun and definitely forget the fiber, or any health-conscious option for that matter. Perhaps the student who most exemplifies the spirit of chicken pattie day is Student A, who after sitting down, carefully proceeds through the following steps:                                  

1. She immediately takes the chicken pattie off the bun.

2. She squeezes not one, but three, mayonnaise packets onto the top of the chicken pattie.

3. She happily licks a bit of the mayonnaise off the chicken pattie.

4. She eats the mayonnaise-coated chicken pattie. There is now a hearty coat of mayonnaise on her face.

5. She now opens a tub of processed butter-flavored spead. She uses her fork to spread the “butter” on her bun.

6. She eats the bun.

7.  Student A then lifts the butter tub to her mouth and licks it clean.

Watching Student A, I couldn’t help but stare.  Student A looked at me and asked in a voice that clearly showed no affect for my awe-stricken face, “What Ms. Bowman, you don’t like mayonnaise? Don’t you put mayonnaise and butter on your chicken pattie?” I weakly stared back and shook my head in an admittedly indecisive manner. For Student A, this was the most natural and acceptable way to eat a chicken pattie. Maybe I am the one who has the real problem. Maybe I have a mayonnaise in large quantities and licking butter spread out of the tub-phobia? Maybe I should start living by the adage of “if you can’t beat them, join them?” Maybe on the next chicken pattie day I should get a couple packs of mayonnaise and tub of butter and spread them all on my own chicken pattie, lick the top, give it a good sniff, take a big bite, and see what I’ve been missing. With this in mind, the future sure does look promising.

caramel oreo fudge, with banana pudding, please

I am notoriously an ice cream fiend. I will happily sit in my bed, on any given day, with a tub of Breyer’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, eat myself sick, doze off, and then wake up again to find myself only longing for more. Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, and, admittedly, I’ve never spent a day in quite this exact scenario, but in the most idealistic of worlds, where I  would never suffer from a lactose-intolerant belly, this could possibly be my ideal day. 

That being said, Rocky Mount’s one gem, and I do mean one, is the CookOut milkshake. Now, at heart, I am truly a devotee of ice cream. I’d prefer my bowl of Moose Tracks a la carte, just me, the ice cream, and the spoon. I don’t want a sundae, a parfait, a sorbet, a gelato, and particularly, not a milkshake. Milkshakes disappoint me with the lack of ice cream and overflow of milk, creating a watery mess that simply leaves me unfulfilled. Moreover,  as an individual who would rather have a bit of everything and go through life creating a mishmash, be it a meal of pancakes with stir-fry or a horribly strewn together outfit,  the redundant choice of chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry makes me, well, bored. 

And then CookOut arrived in Rocky Mount. While it looks  less than promising with its drive-thru only set-up, CookOut can make a mean milkshake.  They have more than forty-six flavors. And this is only the beginning. Forty-six flavors are listed, but the secret is that you can mix as many as you want. Yes, of course you can mix the Oreo with the caramel, and yes of course you can mix the peanut butter with the vanilla. Or you can mix the peanut butter banana with the Oreo and the cheesecake and the fudge. On a recent endeavor, I witnessed the consumption of a banana pudding, peanut butter fudge, and chocolate cheesecake milkshake. And the miracle of it all is that at CookOut,  one of each item goes into your shake; and by this I mean, not a cheesecake-flavored syrup, but an entire piece of cheesecake is going to end up in your hefty sixty-four ounce milkshake. So, in the case of this particular shake, I witnessed a scoop of banana pudding, complete with bananas and vanilla wafers, a tablespoon of peanut butter, an ounce of fudge, and a slice of cheesecake, being swirled up with a bit of ice cream. The end result is that the concept of a straw becomes laughable.

I feel like it is an undeniable truth, given the possibilities of mixing 46 flavors with no limit on number of flavors per shake, that you can make a CookOut milkshake to your liking.

 Now, perhaps the most unbelievable part of the CookOut milkshake phenomenon is that it did not arrive in Rocky Mount until 2008. I know you’re thinking, “I thought Rocky Mount was in the desolate, backwards, middle of nowhere…so I’m not suprised.” And from this perspective, I’m not surprised either. Here comes the baffling part: Nash County, where Rocky Mount is easily the booming central town, is the fattest county in all of North Carolina. Literally. According to data compiled by the NC Risk Factor Surveillance System, 73 percent of Nash County residents were overweight or obese. In addition, 15 percent of children ages five through eleven and 21 percent of children aged 15 through 18 are overweight or obese. (http://www.co.nash.nc.us/HLT/PDF/obesity.pdf) Now, in a county that has been systematically-proven to be the most overweight and obese county of North Carolina, why would any fast-food chain make any possible detour from this town of fat-loving, meat-craving, milk-shake sucking residents? Especially CookOut, which was founded right here in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1989. Perhaps the bigger surprise is that someone from Rocky Mount didn’t come up with the concept of the Cookout milkshake first.

Regardless, CookOut has come to Rocky Mount and the people are happy. And, undeniably, getting larger.

french fries are my vegetable of choice

At the moment, I spend eight hours of each day teaching twenty-two seven and eight year olds reading, math, and how to behave themselves (admittedly, mostly the latter). While I have always lived in North Carolina, the culture shock I have experienced since moving to Rocky Mount, NC, in order to fulfill a two-year commitment with Teach for America, has been no less than a mild-mannered (or vile-mannered) out of body experience. Growing up in a household where meals were reveled for the time put into their preparation and the quality of their ingredients, my world has been shocked and shaken by the majority ideology surrounding the consumption of food in Rocky Mount.

Perhaps the best way to begin to illustrate daily life as I have come to know it, is with a conversation that I hear on a daily basis in the cafeteria lunchroom. ‘Are french fries a vegetable?’ Well, in Rocky Mount, the answer is obvious. ‘Yes.’ My kids know french fries as the vegetable of choice on the lunch menu (and when I say ‘choice’ I mean the choice of the kitchen, not necessarily the children), and when they hear that in my past life, in the culturally-distant, organic oat-eating oasis of Chapel Hill, I was a vegetarian, I generally see their jaws drop in wonder. And here the conversation might slightly vary, but it generally takes the same path each time. “What do  you eat??” they ask. “Well,” I reply, “like right now, I’m eating a veggie burger.” “Does it have chicken in it?” “No.” “Does it have any beef in it?” “No, it’s made of vegetables.” Here, I experience a slight (or not so slight) look of disgust and simultaneous eye-rolling. And so it goes, day after day. I eat vegetables and more vegetables and I become more and more of a source of wonder and awe. 

 As for my veggie burgers, the latest and greatest veggie burger episode goes like this:

[background information: I shamelessly love ketchup. and therefore I coat my lunchtime veggie burger in it. and the kids notice this.]

…I’m eating my lunch and student with colorless cafeteria burger sits down beside me.

She sees me eating my veggie burger, and alas, yes, the ketchup is oozing down the sides…she takes notice… she removes the bun from her burger, squeezes out two packets of ketchup onto the top of her ‘meat’ and replaces the bun.

She happily picks up the burger, ketchup oozing down the sides and proclaims, “Look Ms. Bowman, I got me a veggie burger too!” 

And this! this! is what I mean when I want to grab someone by the shoulders and shake them heartily and ask, ‘where am I?,’…maybe it’s that I work with seven-year olds, or maybe it’s Rocky Mount, or maybe it’s both. Anyway, maybe I should start using less ketchup.